Ticketmaster Tweaks Ticket Fee Transparency Via Twitter

Ticketmaster now lists fees in the beginning of the purchase process, but it stops short of including them in the price of a ticket.

Ticketmaster has announced that it intends to “do a better job” explaining those universally-detested “convenience” fees. They telegraphed this on Twitter — on a Sunday — maybe because there isn’t much to see here.

The number one complaint by music fans (who tend to agree on little) is the additional cost which are disclosed late in the ordering process when you have more invested in closing the deal.

Ticketmaster’s fees are divided between Ticketmaster, venues, promoters, artists, managers, tour managers, etc. on a sliding scale depending on how the deal is structured. They aren’t trivial: As the illustration to the right shows, this fee can add 45 percent to the cost of the transaction.

Tickemaster boss Irving Azoff Tweeted the news on a lazy, end-of-summer Sunday that doesn’t seem to befit an major announcement, perhaps it is much less than meets the eye. Ticketmaster will — we don’t know when — just list these fees up front so that potential customers can see them without clicking all the way through.

We get it — you don’t like service fees. You don’t like them mostly because you don’t understand what the heck they are for. We’ll try to do a better job in this space over the coming months of helping you understand our business, and how our fees compare to others in the industry (both in ticketing and e-commerce in general). But the reality of the live entertainment business is that service fees have become an extension of the ticket price. Most of the parties in the live event value chain participate in these service fees either directly or indirectly – promoters, venues, teams, artists, and yes, ticketing companies – and service fee rebates are our largest annual expense at Ticketmaster.

This new system is not totally transparent because Ticketmaster doesn’t explain the exact breakdown of the fees between the various stakeholders in each transaction. (As Azoff tweeted, “The fees don’t go to TM. Only a portion do.”) If transparency is the point, why not tell fans where these fees are going?

That’s not all. When you select a certain number of tickets from the dropdown menu, Ticketmaster does not update its prices to include the total price and fees for all the tickets, but instead, keeps listing the single ticket price. To that charge, Azoff tweeted in response last night that Ticketmaster “can’t boil all fees down to a per ticket fee until we know how many tix are bought and shipping method chosen, so it has to happen later.”

We understand that the bit about the shipping method, but why not reveal the fees as pertain to single versus group purchases earlier in the process? Ticketmaster charges a flat per-ticket fee now, so it has nothing to hide on this front other than the way those fees add up.

If service fees are an extension of the ticket price why aren’t they actually included in the price all the time?

Ticketmaster as much as acknowledges that it’s ridiculous to list the fees separately, saying in its blog post, “You will begin to see many of our clients move to truly all-in pricing, because they know it sells more tickets and makes you happier.”

But the company should go even further and require its clients to list “all-in” prices, even if some artists and other stakeholders are insisting that the fees be listed separately.

Consumers should not have to care about these fees, plain and simple. Each dollar that comes out of their wallets is identical. Because they do have to care, at Ticketmaster’s behest, it’s nice that the fees are at least listed on the main page for the show rather than surfacing later in the purchase process as they had done in the past.

Why won’t Ticketmaster require all-in pricing for all shows? The answer could lie with @irvingazoff’s very first tweet from under three weeks ago: “So if you want ticket prices to go down, stop stealing music.”

By continuing to list the fees separately, Ticketmaster apparently wants to make the point that the “convenience fees” are split between itself and other parties, including artists, who must insist on high live music fees as other sources of income dry up.

No matter how you slice it, for Ticketmaster to list the components of any of its product’s prices has always been a ridiculous policy, and will continue to be for many shows.

Even the airline industry, which started charging separately for checking bags, eating food, and so on, doesn’t tack on extra fees for things you absolutely need in order to fly — like wings. Ticketmaster’s tickets, conversely, cannot be purchased without those fees (again, unless all the stakeholders/Ticketmaster clients agree to lump them in with the price of a ticket).

Wired Magazine lists its price in the iTunes store (iTunes link) as $3.99 — not “$2.79 for content plus a distribution fee of $1.20 ” to externalize iTunes’ percentage from the normal price. Standard practice in other industries is to add all of the internal costs of a product into one simple price rather than breaking out a mysterious fee to pay a varying mix of stakeholders. It’s not complicated to include all costs in a price, Ticketmaster’s protestations to the contrary.

Azoff has a point that Ticketmaster should charge a different price for sending tickets by express mail, but that has nothing to do with this “convenience” component getting broken out from other costs.

If Ticketmaster really cared about transparent pricing, we wouldn’t even know these fees were there. Ticketmaster should insist on all-in pricing, rather than offering it on a case-by-case basis.